Sam Wickert and his colleagues at SOKRISPYMEDIA have taken YouTube, Hollywood and Silicon Valley by storm, but they’re happy to call Greenville home.
Photo by Nathan Bingle
Sam Wickert
Claim to fame: Co-founder and director of SOKRISPYMEDIA.
Origin story: Wickert met creative partner Eric Leigh in fifth grade. The pair created their own YouTube channel while in high school.
Client list: The company has created visual effects for HBO, Epic Games, Google Daydream, Universal Orlando Resorts, Red Bull, Intel and the band Twenty One Pilots.
Gone viral: Released in July 2020, the team’s 16-minute video Chalk Warfare 4.0 has chalked up 112 million views (and counting).
Quotable: “We considered other cities like Austin and Charlotte,” Wickert says. “But everyone on the team who visited Greenville loved it, so we decided to make the move.”
Greenville native Sam Wickert is stoked about being back in his hometown. After working in Southern California for almost a decade, Wickert recently moved the company he started with childhood friend Eric Leigh to downtown Greenville.
SOKRISPYMEDIA is a production company that produces in-house visual effects for their own films and for clients in film, television, commercials, video games and virtual reality. The team’s YouTube channel has more than 2.3 million subscribers, where SOKRISPY is best known for its four-part video series Chalk Warfare, which has more than 250 million views.
Wickert and Leigh created the original Chalk Warfare while they were in high school. Wickert attended J.L. Mann in Greenville, while Leigh went to Mauldin High. The two-minute video features two teams that battle with weapons scribbled into existence with colored sidewalk chalk. Since it went live on YouTube in May 2012, the video has more than 56 million views. Wickert and Leigh produced Chalk Warfare 2.0 and 3.0 before graduating in 2015 and moving to California to attend film school at Chapman University.
“After two years, we decided to take a leave of absence to work on a project with Google Daydream,” Wickert says. “My leave of absence wound up being extended indefinitely.”
When the team began work on Chalk Warfare 4.0, Wickert says it was important to return to South Carolina.
“I wanted the series to feel cohesive. So, we decided to shoot half in California and half in Greenville,” he says. “We had to bring the team to Greenville for an extended period for production. That was the kickstart of our company moving.”
Wickert says it’s exciting to be part of the growing creative community in the Upstate.
“It is easier for us to create a successful product here,” Wickert says. “We have more space to be creative and there is less red tape. There is also a growing talent pool, and the support of the community is unbelievable.”